Gamma Gamma

After quite a few hours exploring various render setups to try and get decent render passes for my Bruton render I was up against a bit of a brick wall.

All of the rendered elements out of 3ds max were too dark, as if they had a gamma of 1.0 or less.

I was lucky enough to get a response from a user on the CG Society forums who explained that when rendering elements as a 32bit format such as .HDR or .EXR they need to output with gamma set to 1.0 whereas when rendering out 8bit or 16bit formats like .BMP or .JPG you need to have gamma set to 2.2 in 3ds max!

I also found .EXR is a great format in that it can contain all the render elements as separate layers in the single file! Very handy indeed, when compositing  in photoshop. However a plugin is required, called ProEXR

Heres a link to the forum post 

Heres a link to ProEXR